Tuesday, February 17, 2015

The cycleUshare pilot
test was removed from the University of Tennessee (UT) Knoxville Campus in
December 2014. We get frequent requests for information from interested parties
thoughout the world on this concept and how it can be replicated. This document
is meant to be a brief history of the pilot test, how it was born, how it was
operated, how it died, and ultimately how it will continue to contribute to the
evolution of e-bike sharing. There is a FAQ at the end of the post. First, the
cycleUshare system was motivated by the parallel emergence of bikeshare and
e-bike technology, from about 2005 onward. While both technologies rapidly
evolved, the industries were doing everything they could to grow their existing
business models without much (revealed) interest in trying to integrate the
technologies. In the meantime, a few in the academic community were curious if
the two technologies could co-exist and I (Chris Cherry) decided to see if the
technology could work and if it could add value to existing bikeshare
models. The cycleUshare system was a research and education experiment designed
to test e-bikes in a bikeshare system and to provide many the opportunity to
ride and see e-bikes and bikeshare, which was the first exposure of this
technology to many of the observers. I wanted to make sure we also included
regular bicycles, so people would have a chance to use those if desired, which
are better on most metrics.

System Development

The first seed to get
this project started was a College of Engineering research equipment grant. As
a transportation researcher, my research work is generally done in the field,
so traditional lab equipment was of little use to me. In 2010, I proposed to
use an equipment grant to fund the development of an e-bikeshare station. I was
fortunate to win this grant ($30,000) which allowed me to buy 15 e-bikes
(modified Currie Technologies I-Zip Trekking Enlighted) and 6 regular bikes
(modified Marin Larkspur). The concept was for two 10 dock stations, each with
seven e-bikes and three bicycles, and no distribution between stations, i.e.,
bikeshare trips must be “round trips” back to the origin station. The bikes had
combinations locks with them to park away from the station. We also relied on a
battery swap system to assure that when bikes were in the rack, they always had
a charged battery available, and this reduced some of the challenges with
recharging on the bike. We always had batteries on the charger, even when all
the bikes were out. We were also able to use this seed funding to start
developing a racking system, fundamentally based on very robust car-door latch
technology, and a user kiosk that also included a battery charging bank. The
software/hardware controls were originally developed using National Instruments
hardware and Labview software. We also developed custom GPS data loggers for
the bikes to support the research questions.The initial bit of
money was earmarked for equipment and hardware only. Since there were no
vendors on the market, we built everything (except the bikes) from the ground
up. The main partners were our own University of Tennessee Civil Engineering
shop staff and research staff from the Department of Biosystems Engineering.
They put in a lot of sweat equity. We also had plenty of students who volunteered­­–painting,
welding, and doing coursework that fit and so on.

One of the bigger
lessons learned was to include some padding in the schedule to let the lawyers
have their way. UT is self-insured as a State institution and we had to make
sure we did some due diligence to minimize risk and make sure that UT was as
shielded as much as possible from the bad behavior of our bike riders. We were
able to secure permission to run the program for 18-24 months as a research and
education experiment.

We built the first
station in Spring 2011 and installed it at Presidential Court in the heart of
UT campus in the July 2011. We ran our initial trial during the academic school
year of 2011-2012 and pushed to finish our second station, which was a
solar-powered, off-grid station by spring 2012. We needed a financial boost
from UT and the student sustainability fee was able to give us a $15,000 grant
to finish the second solar-powered station. We were a little late with that
station, finishing in the March/April period, just in time for students to
disappear for the summer. The original intention was to tie that station into
the power grid so that we could net-meter the solar and grid electricity. In
the end, it would have been more expensive to tie into the grid than to just
run the system off-grid. This made the system truly zero-emission (use phase),
meaning we didn’t draw from any coal power plants to charge our batteries,
contrasting with the other slightly more symbolic solar EV charging
installations.

Operating
the System

Once we had a good
start, Tennessee DOT was interested in some of the research questions that the
hardware enabled and we received a $50,000 grant to explore safety, health, and
behavior related research. TDOT at the time was investing in bikeshare in
Chattanooga and later Nashville, and most recently Franklin. In addition to the TDOT grant, the Southeastern Transportation Center, a Federal University Transportation Center, supported graduate students on the project, focusing on safety analysis. The nice thing
about those grants are that they were for people (not hardware), so we were able to
pay graduate students and staff to work on developing the system and running
the experiments. This really helped Casey Langford and his dissertation work.

We ran both of the
stations throughout the 2012/2013 academic years. We didn’t charge users
anything, instead focusing on the system as a transportation service to the
community with zero marginal cost (similar to most bikeshare systems). We did
explore conducting price experiments, but couldn’t get our software to behave.
Through this time were able to gather a good amount of data from the platform
that ultimately resulted in some publications that were the first of their kind
focused on e-bike sharing. Of course, one of the big challenges was running the
system while doing the research. My students and I spent a lot of time working
with customers (UT students, faculty, and staff). We dealt with flat tires,
dead batteries, lost bikes, and crashes; everything a bikeshare operator has to
deal with. We never pretended to have a functioning customer service operation
and our users knew this. We also had a fair share of software problems. Some of
these problems were mysterious bugs in the software, others were simply design
problems. We relied on users who could follow directions precisely. Our
software was full of dead-ends, meaning that a user would make a wrong turn in
the check-out/check-in prompts and would never be able to recover, leaving the
system stalled for the next person. The good user would send a message to me or
Taekwan and we’d respond, most users just walked away leaving the system
frozen. More on that later. In terms of demand, we ran two stations that did not have much overlap in service, so it was a
little bit difficult managing users. We usually had a lot of capacity on our
solar station on Ag campus, but we regularly ran out of bikes at our main
Presidential Court station. So when we would add users we would speculate on
which station they would use. Our solar Ag campus station was close to a
greenway and more often used for lunchtime excursions etc. Our Presidential
Court station was used for getting around campus. We couldn’t open up the
system for all users because we wanted to make sure there were bikes available.
We ended up with about 100 active users between the two stations (20 bikes). We
had about 700 on the waiting list. This worked out pretty well, but would create
image problems. For example, when working on the station in the
evening/morning, we would encounter people on the wait list and they’d ask why
they weren’t able to use the system yet. We, with a straight face, would tell
them that we had too much demand, while we were standing by a station full of
bikes. We’d then go on to talk about peak availability and peak demand, but it
would have been good to figure out how to accommodate more users. Pricing could
have accomplished this.

The end of cycleUshare

When the summer of
2013 came, most of my graduate students and I left the country to do research
overseas. The research funding ran out as well and we had arrived at the sunset
of our two-year permission window with UT administrators. We had a couple of research
grants that were under review, but we couldn’t justify spending time and
expense running the system over the summer without the resources. We shut down
the system for the summer and lent a few of our most active users bikes that
they could use. When the 2013/2014 school year started, we approached the UT
administration and asked if they were interested in continuing to support the
bikeshare system on campus. We offered to run the system, still conducting
research and pursuing grants for the open research questions, if they could
give us support on the operations and maintenance. I also suggested that the
system should expand if it were to really make a dent in campus transportation.
After a few proposal iterations, the campus administration allowed us to
continue running the system if we could find external funding, but UT
(administration or student sustainability fee) would not provide any funds for
the system. At this point we waited on outstanding research
proposals that were under review, but saw the end potentially coming near. In
Fall 2014, we learned that we did not win the last research grant that was
outstanding (focusing on fully integrating the bikeshare system with transit)
and we decided that we would pull the system off campus, which we ultimately
did in December 2014. We are in the process of repurposing much of the hardware and bikes for uses that can support the interesting things UT is doing and supporting our next steps.

What’s
next for cycleUshare

We found when we were
operating our system that things we did for expediency, were not suitable for a
commercial product. For example, our controls and user interface were created
in Labview, which is not designed for this type of application. It was good in
the sense that we could deploy it rapidly and it integrated nicely with
existing (National Instruments) controls hardware. However, created some
problems with a few of the research applications we were trying to explore
(like pricing experiments). Also, when interested parties wanted what we
created, it was difficult to hand over the code for them to evaluate, or find
programmers to modify the system. One of the main frustrations I hear from
municipalities and others is that existing bikeshare systems are single-design,
proprietary systems that do not integrate well into existing system. Once
expensive hardware systems are purchased, the customer is locked into that
technology, a marriage that has little flexibility and is very expensive to
break.

We decided to open up
our system, hardware, software, and electronics. This is involving some careful
redesign of our controls system, moving away from National Instruments control
hardware to a more versatile open source input/output hardware system. We also
are rewriting our software, in Java and Python, so that it will be accessible
to the largest community of developers. It will be integrated into our new
hardware system, and will be more robust and flexible than our previous
version. This helps with some of the software bugs discussed above. We are
finally developing physical design documents that could be applied or modified
to fabricate stations. The idea is, for the first release, to provide
everything needed to replicate the system we developed, warts and all. The
placeholder website is currently www.openbikeshare.org,
and all information will be linked or posted from there. We intend to provide
all of software and system design under a non-commercial open source license in
the near future.

So, cycleUshare is
dead. It was, in my mind, a successful first attempt at integrating electric
bikes into bikeshare. It was never meant to be run by me and my research team
indefinitely, but we would have been excited to see it grow into something
bigger than a small research experiment. We learned a lot from the project and
hope that we can continue to build on the lessons to bring sustainable
transportation to the forefront.

Frequently Asked
Questions

1)How
much did it cost to build your system?

This is a
tricky question, because we used a lot of “soft” resources like student and
staff support, as well as access to fabrication facilities for both our stations
and our electronic and controls systems. We also made a few mistakes along the
R&D track, which we would not make again. We would also spend more money on
some sensors to improve reliability. So, if we had to do it over again, each
grid-tied 10-bike station would cost about $5,000-7,500 in materials. Add solar
power and peripherals would be another $5,000 or so. Better electronics, etc.
would cost marginally more. Our open source system should provide all that is
needed to get good fabrication cost estimates. Our system can use any type of
bike, so it is up to you how much you want to spend on bikes.

2)If
you could do three things different, what would they be?

1)Step
through frames for our bikes. Our one-size-fits-all bikes didn’t comfortably fit
people in the low 5’ range, eliminating a group of users, mostly women. Step
through frames would have solved this.

2)Design
more idiot-proof software, even if it takes longer. Our software was not robust
enough to handle user mistakes. Never overestimate the human factors!

3)For
our system, on-bike battery charging. We didn’t have so much turnover that it
justified battery swapping (see some of our papers). Onboard charging could
have made the software a little simpler and more user-friendly for our demand
levels. This might have creates some new challenges though associated with
running higher voltage to the rack itself.

3)If
you deemed your system a success, why is it gone?

The primary
goals of cycleUshare were to conduct research, really a proof of concept pilot test,
on e-bikesharing and a few questions surrounding the system. It was also an
education platform where we could share EV technology and bikeshare technology
broadly with the UT community and beyond. We achieved most of those goals. Like
all transportation systems, their benefits are “public” so they rely on some
combination of user fees and public investments; transit, highways, and parking
come to mind.Bikeshare systems have
been shown to be very cost-effective ways to serve short urban trips, but still
require non-user-fee investment. Bikeshare in most cities relies on a mix of
user fees, direct government support, and sponsorship (advertisement). UT’s
administrators would not invest in something that was not “self sustaining”,
which is impossible for nearly all transportation systems. The research team
was not in a position to create a package of funding to support the system so
we allowed it to die.

4)Did
you have any theft problems?

No, we did
not have any explicit theft problems. We had a little bit of vandalism, where
bikes would have brake cables ripped out, or people would use the leverage of
the bike to twist on the bracket (theft attempt or not?). We never lost a bike.
However, UT is a pretty low bike-crime type of area and there were times when I
found our cycleUshare bikes unlocked, but unstolen.

5)Did
you have any safety problems?

We had
three documented crashes in about two years, two car-bike crashes and one
reported single bike crash. A regular bicycle crash resulted in a minor injury
and a police report (car turned left in front of cyclist). One e-bike rider was
struck in a crosswalk, without injury. Another e-bike rider hit a curb and
crashed, without injury. Those three crashes resulted in minor damage to the
bikes. There was some evidence of minor crashes (or abuse) on bikes that were
not recorded, slight damage was found on a few bikes.

6)What’s
next for cycleUshare?

We get a
lot of enquiries from organizations and individuals who want to replicate what
we’ve done in some form or another. All requests have slightly different
flavors, but unfortunately, most of the bikeshare industry sells only minor
variations of the same product. We are hesitant to sell anyone the keys to our
system (hardware/software/electronics) without the backend support to maintain
it, so we’ve decided to provide all of our station designs, software, and
electronics in an open source platform (www.openbikeshare.org).
This way, the community can take our system, which is not elegant in many
places, and improve it and modify it to meet their specific needs.

7)Where
can I get any of the literature you produced from this study?

Each of the
articles below has a link to the publisher website. Most are locked behind a
pay wall. If you can’t access the articles through your library subscriptions, email
me (cherry@utk.edu) and I’ll find a way to share the results. We have at least
three more working papers that are not yet published in journals.

Apologies
if I miss people here, but the main players who made contributions to either
building systems or research were:

Levon
Brassfield (BS Student EECS)

Andrew
Campbell (MS Student CEE)

Phillip
Goldfarb (BS Student EECS)

Shuguang
Ji (PhD Student CEE)

David
Jordan (MS Student CEE)

Brian
Casey Langford (PhD Student CEE)

Ryan
Overton (PhD Student CEE)

Larry
Roberts (CEE Shop Fabricator)

David
Smith (Research Associate Biosystems Engineering)

Ken
Thomas (CEE Shop Machinist)

Stacy
Worley (Research Associate Biosystems Engineering)

John
Wilkerson (Professor Biosystems Engineering)

Taekwan
Yoon(PhD Student CEE)

Really big
thanks to Larry Pizzi at Currie Technologies and his staff for a coming in with
a very good price on e-bikes and batteries and years of free technical support.
Also thanks to SRAM/Quarq for some other enabling hardware.

9)I’m interested in information that I could
not find here. Who do I contact? Chris Cherry, Associate Professor, Civil
and Environmental Engineering University of Tennessee, Knoxville